In recent years, network communication services have expanded and increased in popularity around the world. Many advanced networks offer mobile wireless communication services for voice calls, messaging services, and data communications. The data communication services enable users of mobile communication devices to surf the world wide web via web browsers, for example, as well as enable applications running on the communication devices to connect to remote network devices or servers to upload or download content and information.
To support the increased popularity of data communications services, operators of mobile wireless communication networks have had to expand the capacity of their networks. The increased capacity is typically provided by adding additional base stations, routers, gateways, and switches to the networks, to enable the network to serve more mobile devices, or to provide more communications capacity for each mobile device.
The network's use of supplementary and duplicative systems, however, makes it harder to identify when failures occur within the network. For example, a network may include multiple serving gateways used to handle network traffic, the serving gateways dividing amongst themselves a large volume of network traffic. If a failure occurs in one of the serving gateways, only a small portion of the network traffic will be affected as the remaining serving gateways continue to function properly and handle new requests. Network administrators may therefore not become aware of the failure, and may therefore fail to address the failure promptly.